IMAGINE A WORLD where each family has a powerful magic battery that provides energy for their transport between home and work every day.
The SAME magic battery is used by the city’s electricity utility company to provide light and heat for the wider community every evening.
The family’s energy costs fall, because the electricity firm pays each family for access to the magic battery every night.
Here’s the good news: that world already exists, to some extent. In places which are making the transition to electric vehicles, the family car has already become a personal giant electricity storage device (that means China, Norway, Sweden and Denmark).
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MONEY FOR NOTHING
Since the average motorist uses his or her vehicle for just five per cent of their day, it lies idle for 95% of its life. He or she can sell the power it contains to the grid for use during peak energy usage periods—and get money for nothing.
“China wants to turn idle electric cars into mobile energy storage that can stabilize power grids during peak demand,” said Kinling Lo in a report for RestofWorld, a news website.
How would it work?
Power station staff notice that electricity demand soars every evening as workers get home, turn on the lights, cook dinner and watch TV. Staff flick a switch and get extra power for the city from a thousand electric cars sitting unused outside people’s homes during that period.
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MULTIPLE CHALLENGES
This has long seemed like a good idea, and many countries have been looking at it for years, including China, the US, Europe, South Korea, and Japan.
But since the idea was first mooted in the late 1990s, promoters have found multiple challenges. You need cars which have special, high-tech vehicle-to-grid (V2G) connectors and you need a huge network of dedicated two-way power stations.
At the moment, there are two main options to solve the first problem. One is to create wall-chargers that convert Direct Current (DC) of the grid to and from Alternating Current (AC) that cars use.
The other is to create devices inside the car that take DC and convert it to AC—with BYD, Tesla and Renault opting for that system.
The first system wins on quality and safety but is expensive. The second is cheaper but may be less safe. The production of prototypes and testing of systems continues in China and Europe, as well as in other places on a smaller scale.
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UK AND US TOO
The UK’s Octopus energy company started a partnership with Shenzhen’s BYD “to allow consumers to lease a charger and electric vehicle equipped for AC V2G,” New Scientist reported this week.
The US has launched a V2G project in Delaware to test out systems.
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LARGER ISSUES
Consumers also have concern about battery degradation and costs of setting up the system. Profit margins may be thin, too.
But the main problem is community willpower. You need to have a country where the leaders take the move to clean energy seriously. This gives China and Europe an advantage, as both have widespread influence on their communities.
“At least 30 V2G stations have been set up across nine cities including Beijing and Shanghai,” reported Lo of Restofworld. “The plan is to have 5,000 such stations among China’s 28 million total charging points by 2027.”
Europe is also serious about this. It recently passed a law which said that from January 8, 2026, ALL new charging points, even for privately or semi-publicly operated charging stations, must have “bidirectional charging”. The aim is to have widespread V2G adoption available by next year.
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LOWERING DEPENDENCE
The development has become more urgent, thanks to the global realization that dependence on fossil fuels must be lessened, thanks to the unpredictable efforts by certain parties to control the global fossil fuels market.